First published in Pharma Industry, November 2019. Republished in full, translated from the Swedish original.
The argument in this second part is that on-page work only takes you so far, and that what separates the sites that win is what happens away from their own pages: who links to them, and why. The definition of a good link, popularity, topic relevance and trust in the domain, still describes what practitioners look for, and the account of private blog networks and the September 2014 crackdown reads as history, not as advice.
Four things here need checking before anyone acts on them, and this note names all four, because naming only some would leave the rest looking settled. The opening claim that backlinks make up 40 to 50 percent of a well-executed SEO strategy is given without a source, and it is the single figure in the article a reader is most likely to carry away; treat it as a 2019 estimate of a weighting, not as the weighting. PageRank is used throughout as a value you can read off a site that links to you, and the article does not say where you read it. Before working that way, check what number you would actually be looking at and whether it comes from the search engine or from the tool showing it to you. The link building section recommends acquiring links by asking for them, by guest posting in exchange for a link in the text and in the author bio, and by running outreach programmes with paid tools; the article presents that whole class of tactic as ordinary practice, and anyone building a programme on it should read the search engines' own current guidance on link schemes before starting. And the competitor analysis section proposes producing content that mirrors a competitor's profile in order to take their links, which is a positioning question as much as an SEO one.
The platforms and tools belong to 2019. LinkedIn Articles, Medium, Reddit and Quora are named as the places to publish for visibility, Twitter has since been renamed X, and the fact box lists nine tools that should each be checked before use, among them a Google Analytics that has since moved to a different version. The article is honest about its own limits in one respect worth noting: it says outright that nobody knows how link quality is judged because the algorithm is secret, and then offers three factors anyway, which is the right way to read the rest of it too. Neither this article nor Part 1 was written in a world where a generated summary can sit above the links; generative AI arrived in 2023, after both. One paragraph in the manuscript, at the end of the section on organic links, breaks off mid-sentence, and it has been left out, not completed.
As a continuation of the series on digital marketing published here in Pharma Industry, where subjects such as email, websites, webinars, eRep and eMSL, social media, basic search engine optimization (SEO) and more have been covered, it is now time to dive even deeper into the world of Google and the other search engines to see what makes some websites do better than others in the search results. In this article Fredrik Holmboe, digital strategist, together with Robert Nyberg, specialist in international SEO, goes through among other things what is said today to make up around 40 to 50 percent of a well-executed SEO strategy, namely backlinks.
Well aware that there are not many readers of Pharma Industry working with prescription products who will get much use out of this article in their daily work, it is written nonetheless with the thought of being a support for you who work with OTC products and disease awareness, and of serving as general grounding in the subject of search engine optimization.
When we talk about digital marketing, the foundation of all communication online is some form of content. Content placed on some form of digital resource online, such as a website, or in a social media channel such as Facebook.
Wherever content is published, and whether it is in text form, as an image, film, animation or an audio clip, it competes with an incredible amount of other content on the same or an equivalent subject.
To avoid being one of the organizations that adds to the digital noise we all suffer from daily, and so getting very little return on investment (ROI), you have to burrow into the details and take your SEO seriously.
And by "burrow into" is meant not only that you school yourself in the kind of SEO covered in the previous article (PI 2-19), what is usually called "on-page SEO", but also that you look at what is called "off-page SEO", which is the strategies and initiatives that happen outside your own website. This is often the part of SEO that organizations forget entirely, with the result that the organizations which take in the full span of search engine optimization give themselves a competitive advantage online.
We are writing this article to give you as a reader a greater insight into the full span of search engine optimization, and our hope is that you get small moments of recognition and then choose to go back to earlier articles about multichannel marketing here in Pharma Industry to widen the story.
You will find those articles if you google "Pharma Industry Fredrik Holmboe".
You do not always have to go into every detail, but you have to know that it is in the details that you win digitally.
In earlier articles I have written about how much content is actually created (Social media, PI 3-18), about how you can hold a very important focus in your own content production by creating a proper buyer persona (Mistakes to avoid, PI 1-19) and about how you work on from there with on-page SEO (SEO part 1, PI 2-19).
One of the threads running through those articles has been to make the point of how important it is to hold a focus in what you create and publish online. If there is no narrow focus, the result risks becoming too scattered, and therefore toothless, in the data-driven world Google rules over.
It is not without reason that the expression "publish and pray" was coined, and, we still have to say it, far too often we see examples of large resources being put into a content strategy where the preparatory work is thin and the execution, and therefore the result, suffers for it.
Let us instead assume now that all the pieces are in place, that the preparatory work has been done thoroughly, that content has been created with high value for your defined buyer persona and that it is based on a proper keyword analysis. Let us assume that these articles have been published by the book, with correct title tags, alt tags, H1s and H2s, bold sentences, bullet lists, relevant internal linking to your own articles and one or two external links to articles in the same area. And so on. What do the companies that succeed best at landing high in Google's search results do beyond all that?
They do what they can to get as many other websites as possible to link to their most valuable and most worked-through content. The reason is that links from other people's websites to your own have always been an important, positive signal for Google and a fundamental part of SEO work. These links are what are called backlinks.
A backlink is a reference to your website from another website, inserted there together with a link. Every time another website mentions and links to your website, you have gained a backlink.
An example: If you want to read more about what backlinks mean, there is a very good resource on Wikipedia.
The three underlined words are in this case a backlink to Wikipedia, since they say what the subject is and link to the relevant page.
A term Google has long used is PageRank, which is a "valuation" of every indexable page or URL Google has found. PageRank is one of the factors in their algorithm for ranking pages in the search result at the moment of a search, the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), and two of the factors, among many others, for judging a page's PageRank are that page's incoming links, both in terms of quantity and of quality.
To put it in an image, you can liken links to votes of varying strength. How much impact the incoming link has on your own page's position in Google's SERP is decided by how many incoming votes, and what individual authority those votes carry, exist at the other, linking page.
The simple logic behind why Google values backlinks is that the people responsible for a website, when they choose where to link, more often link and "give their vote" to a popular and high-quality website than to a poor or mediocre one.
So many incoming links matter, but it matters just as much that they are of high quality.
At the end of the 1990s Google saw off, among others, the then largest search engine Altavista. The success factor was precisely the PageRank concept and the quantity and quality of links between websites.
Fast forward ten years and private blog networks (PBN) have been created to exploit that concept.
A private blog network has a subject focus, and the linking between the network's various blogs is designed to raise each blog's average PageRank.
Through a defined link structure the owners then created blogs to which they built a large volume of backlinks, which gave those sites high authority within their respective subjects. Via those sites they then sold outgoing links to customers who wanted to improve their own website's position in Google's search results.
This was a well-established tactic nine or ten years ago, and many companies built their entire business on a website that generated a lot of traffic.
Now fast forward to September 2014, when Google began focusing on squeezing these private blog networks, and overnight there were many websites that disappeared completely from Google's search results. Many companies that saw their whole business disappear from one day to the next.
What happened was that Google began classing links from private blog networks as "toxic", today called "link toxicity", and with a link profile full of that type of incoming link, websites were punished hard.
A valuable backlink is, as we have already established, a link from a website with a high average PageRank. But that is not the whole truth, and since Google keeps its algorithm secret with constant updates, nobody really knows. But over time three points have emerged as relevant:
In SEO, the work of getting more backlinks is called "link building", and it is difficult and time-consuming work. To get a good result it takes creativity, strategic thinking, analysis, hard selling and the patience to follow the same strategy over a longer period.
A good link building strategy should contain one or more of the following tactics.
Create content and put a lot of focus on spreading it across different channels. As for written content, this can be published in channels such as LinkedIn Articles, Medium, Reddit and Quora to get better visibility. To spread the article (wherever it is published), this can be done on the personal and company channels of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
With greater visibility and spread, the chance increases that good content will get links from the people who consume it, so-called organic links.
Sometimes your company, brand or product is mentioned on a website without there being a link to you behind it. This is called a "mention" and is perhaps the simplest and most scalable way to generate backlinks.
Often referred to as reactive link building, it is about using tools, SEMrush for instance, to scan the internet for words or phrases connected to your business. The tool lists the websites that have mentioned you, whether they linked or not, on which page they mentioned you and whether it was in a positive, neutral or negative context. Contact the website, thank them for mentioning you and ask whether they would consider linking to you in a way, if that is possible, that gives their visitors added value.
There are quite certainly websites you would gladly have a link from if you got the chance. Perhaps a list of wished-for sites already exists today? If not, paid tools such as Buzzstream and PitchBox can help identify and simplify the process of finding high-quality websites for you, creating a list for prioritization and sending out messages to whoever is responsible for the site. The difficulty in this tactic is the answer to the question of why your wish for a backlink should be granted by the other organization.
High-quality websites usually get several requests a week, so how do you stand out from the crowd?
Assume you have put large resources into putting together an important research report. You know the results have great potential to affect, for instance, public debate, the current state of research or how healthcare treats a particular diagnosis. What you now do is contact the relevant publications, websites and organizations whose readers, visitors or members have a very large interest in your report. With a setup like that, the chance is good that those you contact will choose to link to you and your report, since it gives great value to their audience.
You can write a really good article and then offer it as a post from someone at your organization as a guest writer. It is not unusual for the exchange to include the chance to include a link in the text and one in the author biography.
When it comes to SEO and how you analyze competitors' websites, there are mainly two areas: a gap analysis of the site's link profile and a gap analysis of its content.
In an analysis of a link profile you focus on what kind of links the competitor has, the quantity and quality of the links, the text on the links, the amount of traffic from the links, and on identifying which keywords and phrases the site gets its traffic from.
On the basis of that link analysis you then build further on the gap analysis of content, where it is clear which content has attracted the best links and which keywords and subjects have generated the bulk of their traffic volume.
With that analysis as the foundation, you produce content that mirrors their content profile and is better in terms of substance and user experience. This content can then be used in your outreach to create links.
Technical setup, content and links are critical for getting a website onto Google's first page in the search results. Constantly measuring, evaluating and acting on your search engine optimization gives you the chance to take your results further still. Website traffic, engagement and links are some of the most common KPIs people look at, and beyond those you can keep an eye on:
Having now written nine articles in total and run a couple of two-day seminars together with Pharma Industry, it is clear that many people find search engine optimization a technical and heavy subject. At the same time, the delight is just as great every time I run a live demonstration using one of the tools below and show the audience data and insights relevant to them and their business.
It can be something as simple as showing the keywords people actually search on within a particular subject, or running an analysis of a link profile.
As theory, SEO is a heavy, technical subject, and if you have read through both articles then kudos to you, well fought. In practice SEO is really, really enjoyable given the insights that often come out of the analysis work, and if you want to know more we are only a phone call away.
This two-part article series was started off by one of the questions that came in to the PI editorial team about digital marketing, and if you have a question in the area you would like answered, email the editors at redaktionen@pharma-industry.se.
Until next time.
Fredrik Holmboe
Digital strategist
Head of Inbound
Robert Nyberg
International SEO specialist
Every craftsman knows that a job is easier to carry out if you have the right tools, something that holds true when you work with search engine optimization too. Below are tools that are free to use, marked with an asterisk, and those that cost money.
On-page tools
Off-page tools
| Tool | Comment |
|---|---|
| Buzzstream | A simple web-based program that helps you promote content with automation to your target group in order to create links |
| PitchBox | An advanced web-based program that helps you quickly and easily find bloggers, influencers and others, and with the help of automation promote content in order to create links |
| ahrefs | Content, links and mentions |
Read the Swedish original at pharma-industry.se. Part 1 is here on this site, and at the publisher. Building content other people have a reason to link to is what the Content Engine Sprint is built around.